Girl Against the Universe

To you, the reader

May your Universe be filled with friendship and love.

There's a thing that sometimes happens in your brain when you're the only survivor of a horrific accident. Part of you is happy because you're alive, but the rest of you is devastated. Then the sad part beats up the happy part until nothing is left, until all you feel is terrible sorrow for the people who didn't make it. And guilt. Guilt because you wonder if the Universe made a mistake. Guilt because you know you're not any better than those who died.

This is what my therapist says, anyway. Since I don't feel like talking, he's talking for both of us. I hate people like that, people who think they know what you need to hear, people who think they can read your mind, anticipate your responses. “We're not all the same,” I want to shout. But I don't, because if I talk, then he wins. And I have lost enough already.

“Tell me about the car accident.” Dr. Leed leans toward me.

I glance down at my lap. He doesn't need me to tell him about that. He spent almost an hour “just chatting” with my mom. I'm sure she filled him in on the gory details.

It happened almost five years ago, when I was eleven. My dad, Uncle Kieran, my brother Connor, and I were heading home from a day of rock climbing at a park outside of San Luis Obispo, where I grew up.

Connor and I were fighting about this boy who lived down the street when I saw the giant truck veer dangerously into our lane. The driver must have lost control of his rig as he navigated the twisting mountain road.

Dad tried to swerve onto the shoulder at the last second, but we were driving along the side of a hill and there was just a few feet of concrete and a flimsy guardrail. The back of the truck clipped us, sending both vehicles straight through the guardrail and down the incline. Our car flipped end over end and landed in a rocky ravine. Dad, Uncle Kieran, and Connor were dead before the paramedics could get to us.

I didn't even get hurt.

I was still in the ER when the newspaper people found me. They called me the miracle kid. I'll never forget how they buzzed around, asking prying questions about what I remembered and why I thought I got spared. I had just lost three members of my family, and these people wanted to talk about the luck of the Irish.

My mom tried to shield me from the reporters, but even
tually she gave up and posed with me for a few pictures so they would go away. She said focusing on how I was alive would help everyone cope with losing my dad and uncle, two of the town's most decorated firefighters. It didn't help
me
cope; all I could think was that I should have been nicer to Connor. He was just teasing me. How can something feel so crucial in the moment and then seem completely trivial after the fact?

“Maguire?” Dr. Leed manages to sound both authoritative and concerned.

I shake my head. Reaching up, I pull the ponytail holder from around my bun. I gather my thick curly hair in my hands and twist it tighter and tighter until my eyes start to water. I coil it around in a circle and secure it again.

Dr. Leed taps a couple of sentences into his tablet computer. I'm not close enough to read what they say. “What about the roller coaster?” he asks.

Right. The next year, when I was twelve, a roller coaster car I was riding in careened off the tracks and crashed to the ground at a nearby amusement park. That accident wasn't quite as serious—we were at the bottom of a hill when it happened, and at least no one died—but every single passenger in our car had serious injuries, except for me. My best friend at the time broke both legs, and another friend ended up needing plastic surgery because she landed on her face. I walked away with a couple of scratches that didn't even
require stitches. No one called me a miracle kid that time, but the crazy lady who begs for change at the gas station called me a witch.

We moved after that.

And then a few weeks ago, I left a candle burning on my windowsill and went for a run. When I came back an hour later the next door neighbors' house was completely engulfed in flames. You wouldn't think a brick house could go up like a box of matches from one teensy dollar store votive, but it did.

And so we moved again. This time just to the other side of San Diego, but far enough away to put me in a different school district. Mom said it was because our house had smoke damage, but I'm pretty sure it was because she didn't want to be the mom with the crazy kid who all the other moms whispered about.

That's what landed me back in therapy. Not the moving part—the fire. Because apparently I snapped and ran toward the burning building. Then, as one of the firefighters carried me away from the danger, kicking and screaming, I kept telling him how the whole thing was my fault and how he had to save everybody because I couldn't have any more deaths on my conscience. I don't even remember saying that, but I remember the resulting trip to the hospital and the way the staff all hurried in and out of my room like I was a lit fuse. I remember the psychiatrist asking me if I wanted to hurt myself, the police asking me if I wanted to hurt other people,
and my mother sitting next to me in a chair, not asking me anything, her fingers curled protectively around mine the entire time.

“I don't want to talk about that either.” I raise my head just long enough to meet Dr. Leed's eyes. They're a warm brown, obscured partially by the navy blue glasses he wears. He runs one of his pinkies along his bottom lip. His nail beds look a little gray, like maybe he sported some black nail polish recently. I swear everybody in Southern California has a secret second life. Housewives are aspiring actresses. Busboys are screenwriters. Shrinks are rock stars. Nobody is okay with only being one person. I get tired just thinking about it.

I lean back in my chair and try to envision Dr. Leed as a punk rocker. It's not too much of a stretch. He's got dark brown hair that's a little long for a medical professional, and I can see the outlines of forearm tattoos through the thin fabric of his long-sleeved shirt.

“What
do
you want to talk about?” he asks.

“Nothing.” I scrape the toes of my sandals back and forth across the patterned carpet. It's black with overlapping white circles, but if you squint a little, the circles almost look like skulls.

“Okay,” he says. “I can't make you talk.” He taps some more notes into his computer.

I watch the movement of his fingers, trying to guess what he's writing, but he's too fast. “What are you saying about me?”

“What makes you think I'm saying anything about you?” He gives me a half smile. “Maybe I'm just emailing my girlfriend.”

I return his half smile with a quarter smile, more than a lot of people get. I decide I don't completely hate him after all.

The waiting area is empty except for a boy who looks as if he's been professionally assembled—distressed jeans you can only buy for about two hundred bucks a pop, messy brownish-blond hair you can only get with a fair amount of product and patience, ridiculous tan without any obvious signs of peeling. He's not hot, exactly—his nose is a little crooked and he's a bit lanky, like a baby giraffe still growing into his limbs—but he sure knows how to work with what he's got.

The boy looks up from a sports magazine as I shut the door to the inner office behind me. Cocking his head, he studies me with a harmless sort of curiosity for a moment before dropping his eyes back to his article. He pulls his long legs in close to the seat as I pass by so I don't trip over them. It's the kind of low-key, friendly gesture I appreciate.

“Thanks,” I say.

“You're welcome,” the boy says, which strikes me as odd. Who says that? You're welcome. It's so strangely formal.

Dr. Leed's receptionist slides open a frosted glass partition and motions to the boy. “He's ready for you,” she mouths.
She's got a black phone pinned between her shoulder and ear while she looks up something on the computer. The boy tosses the magazine onto the chair next to him. He stands, stretching his arms over his head. “Wish me luck.” He flashes me a conspiratorial grin. Even his smile looks engineered—warm, friendly, just the right amount of lips and teeth. But it aligns all the rest of his features in a way that makes me second-guess my earlier judgment about his hotness.

“Good luck,” I mumble.

Little does he know I'm the last person he should be asking for luck.